Michała Bakunina krytyka religii

The article is a proposition of interpretation of Mikhail Bakunin's - Russian thinker and revolutionary activist - view on religion. Author makes an attempt to prove that Bakunin's view on religion evolved. Influenced by Fichte and Hegel, he thought that the whole content of religion is love, while inspired by Feuerbach, he embraced an atheistic position, seeing that thanks to religion a human being ceases to be an animal, but simultaneously liberation from the constraints of nature becomes the source of new kind of bondage - a man becomes the slave of God. The substance of Bakunin's philosophical quest was a free individual, hence if a man is free, then God does not exist. In his youth Bakunin was searching for God, but as an adult he denied his existence no less passionately. It is not the case that Bakunin's critic of religion is identical with amoralism and that the freedom without God becomes willfulness. Quite the opposite. Author of the article claims that, in some sense, the theoretical postulate of an adult Bakunin echoes the philosophy of encounter - that dialogicity, relation between Me and You, is fastening together the whole output of the Russian anarchist.

Jacek Uglik